Cards of Identity (32 page)

Take Brother Kapotzky, for instance. He cannot bear to kill a chicken for Sunday dinner. If he sees a worm in his path he picks it up, blesses it, and puts it in a safe place. Is this the result of going to Sunday School in childhood? Not a bit. All through the twenties and thirties Kapotzky was an official of the Ogpu and
NKVD
: thousands went to their death over his loose signature. ‘Believe me,’ he says, ‘it’s only when you’ve liquidated large numbers of people that you appreciate the miracle of life.’ In short, we are all converts today, if we are anything at all, and it is only logical to assume that the greater the preliminary sin, the more triumphant the ultimate conversion. The public
agrees with this and only listens to prayers made with red hands. I remember one novice in our Abbey exclaiming spontaneously: ‘I must say, we are jolly
lucky
to live in an era when sin is considered so very religious.’ To which the Abbot replied drily: ‘I think, Brother Thomas, that
Providential
would be the better word.’

*

Oh, what a day! The crowds, the press-reporters, the noise, the dirt – and the
questions!
I imagine that when expert brain-specialists, endocrinologists and geologists are called-in to give opinions on heads, glands, and substrata they feel the exasperation I feel when I am cross-examined by the defence on my Marxist past and Christian present. What
does
the layman know about either? Absolutely nothing! ‘Is it true,’ they ask, ‘that you were a Soviet agent in Montreal from 1933 to 1938?’ Of course, it is true: it is all down in black-and-white in my confessions: had I not been an agent then would I be an expert on agents now? ‘Did you not commit perjury on May 4th 1931 in Ecuador?’ they continue – well, of course I did, and well they know it: all they are trying to do is persuade the jury that I am not an honest man. And so they go on, interminably: ‘Did you feel no moral scruples?’ ‘Had you no qualms about incriminating an innocent man?’ – really, if it were not that piety enjoins on one a sympathetic attitude to stupid people, I would like to stand them all against a wall and shoot them. Even those who are on my side – the council for the prosecution, the judge, the police, the detectives, the press-reporters – have so little idea of
who
I
really
am
that their misrepresentations are enough to make me scream. Willy-nilly, I find myself back in the old vocabulary and saying to myself: ‘Here’s a pretty kettle of bourgeois fish! Is there among them a single man who has any conception whatever of the fire that burns in the heart of the Party member and the monk?’ I catch the eye of the spy against whom I am testifying and we exchange an invisible wink. Brothers under the skin, and how well we know it! I admire the way he stands up to these oafs. A few cleansing years in jail and he will be ripe for the Abbey.

*

An ugly atmosphere in the refectory. As it was the day of silence I couldn’t find out why until I got back to my cell and heard it in Morse
over my radiator. It seems that yesterday Brother Herbert finished the first draft of a set of confessions in good time to meet the publisher’s deadline (Easter Week). He handed the draft to the Abbot, who, after glancing through it, refused his imprimatur. Why? Nobody knows, but Brother Herbert has been going about with a ghoulish look and won’t eat (hunger-strike?).

*

B. Herbert still not eating.

*

B. Herbert was not at Mass this morning. I at once looked at Brother Kapotzky, and sure enough he was wearing the tortured expression he assumes when the Abbot has made him execute someone. At Vespers, Herbert’s death from pneumonia was announced, simply and movingly, and the Abbot asked our prayers for the repose of his (Herbert’s) soul. We all fell to.

*

The inside story of the Herbert affair turns out to be interesting, but not bizarre. According to Brother Gregory, who is a real Sherlock Holmes in Abbey matters, Herbert was under surveillance throughout Wednesday and Thursday – a precaution the Abbot wisely takes when one of the brothers has had a tiff with him. Apparently, the two brothers who were watching Herbert wondered why he was looking fatter, rather than thinner, in view of his hunger-strike: they concluded that he had concealed the rejected draft of his confessions under his robes. The Abbot ordered it removed: this was done by Brother Nimpy, a clever old servant of God who was a political pickpocket under the Tsar before he became one under the Bolsheviks. Nimpy substituted a brown paper parcel of the same size, and poor Herbert went his way in ignorance. That evening, he was observed flashing his torch from his cell-window; a car drew up and a representative of his publishers came to the foot of the wall, caught the thrown parcel, and sped away. It was too much for the Abbot, who called in Kapotzky at once …

It is a sad story, really, because this was Herbert’s very first confession, apart from the usual witness-box and Sunday-papers ones, and we all felt he would go a long way. I am dying to know how and why
he bungled the draft: he must have made a
complete
hash of it, otherwise the Abbot would merely have edited it in the usual way. It is all the more mysterious, because Herbert’s contributions to the
Encyclo
pedia
had been perfectly ‘in line’ – in fact, he was sometimes rebuked for lagging behind the switches.

*

Herbert’s death has been an irritant. Everybody is going about with a soul-searching look – as if all their confessions had come to nought and would have to be written again. I am not surprised: I share the feeling. Nobody thinks of Herbert as a martyr, but they do feel that he tried to steal a march on the rest of us. Obviously, he confessed things which are not properly confessed, with the result that he leaves the rest of us wondering what they could be and whether any of them might be usable by ourselves. Surely it was enough that he should make us feel small by having pushed ahead, without getting himself killed for it and exciting a spirit of competition in the living?

*

The Abbot preached yesterday (Sunday) about obedience. He showed (you know the argument, I’m sure) that he who is most obedient is most free, in the true sense of the word free, and that he who most respects authority is the least subject to it. He added with a dry smile: ‘I hope you will not apply this logic to the wrong things. It does not follow, for example, that he who is most unselfish is the most selfish, or that he who is the most upright is the most cast-down. Or rather, it
does,
depending on how you twist the words about and whether you take them at their face-value or use them so that they mean the opposite of what they suggest. Your spiritual authority – myself – will always be at hand to tell you how far logic may be pressed, and at what point a word, under the leverage of faith, begins to mean its opposite. In a recent case, I am sorry to say, this authority was not respected and a fatal ambiguity resulted. Royalties and fame, let me remind you all, are not everything, and the confession that lies behind the confession should be rendered to God’s vicar, not to Caesar. So, brothers, be content with what you have already confessed and do not be so proud as to think that you alone are in duty bound to go your fellows one
better. When the world demands a different sort of confession, I will be the first to inform you of the fact.’

Everyone feels much easier as a result of these sensible words. What the Abbot is laying his finger on is the fact that once one begins making confessions, the thing tends to become a disease. After I had confessed in the courts, I could hardly wait to write a book confessing the real truth behind the mere court one. A bare six months after my book was out – and reviewers everywhere applauding the way I had bared myself utterly – I began to have the feeling that I had said nothing at all about
what
really
mattered.
I sat down and wrote a kind of ‘private’ confession (it was later published) that sought to go behind its predecessor. Within a year, that, too, struck me as meaningless – indeed, I began to feel that far from stripping myself really naked, each confession only covered me with still another petticoat. I felt terribly at odds with the world: once I had a ridiculous dream in which a night-club audience cried: ‘Take it off!’ and applauded madly each time I
put
on
another rope of pearls. I began to think of confessions in terms of infinite regression – the very act of making one would cause another to pop up behind it. I even began to suspect that the really true confession would not be about my crimes, etc., but about why I was so eager to write confessions.

It was the Abbot who saved me from madness by convincing me that though the object of confession is to tell the truth, only the proud man attempts to decide for himself what the truth is. If all of us, he explained, insisted on being free-lances in truth-telling, the whole edifice of confession, as it exists today, would fall to the ground, leaving the public with nothing to read but detective-stories. We ex-Party men are the examples which the man-in-the-street follows today: it is not for us to deny him salvation in the name of truth.

What would
I
consider true about my life if I were so proud as to disobey the Abbot and my conscience? Would I ever find a real, final confession underlying all the others? This is hard to answer, because the first thing that strikes me about myself (it is one of the main reasons why I have become a monk) is that I have never in my life been able to know when I am telling a lie and when I am telling the truth. On all matters of fact I am perfectly honest: I can state dates, acts of treason, Party-meetings, executions, etc., with absolute veracity. But once I start confessing the why-and-wherefore of my
behaviour
(as one is
expected to do in a book), I become so entertained by the personal drama of it all that everything I put down has a wonderful
ring
of truth: I feel myself growing from a particular person into a universal design – much as a musician might set out persistently to play the recorder and find himself always in the organ-loft. It is the
notes
that get the better of me: they have such a heavenly
sound
that I cannot think them false. When I read St Augustine’s
Confessions,
I know that he is
telling
the truth; and that there is a great difference.

I don’t want to start writing
another
confession, but if ever the Abbot’s line changes, in response to public needs, I think I would begin by saying that where I differ from St Augustine is that he confesses to smallness whereas I only confess to sins that increase my bulk. I don’t think I could bear to make myself look ridiculous, to confess to having been swayed by petty motives which no organ could amplify into grandeur. I simply have to make the crime fit the confession: it would kill me, I think, to cease to identify myself with a vast historical event and admit that my career resulted from carrying to an extreme the pettiest conceits of the most ordinary man.

Well, I have said it, and I am still alive! The next question then is: for what petty reason did I become a Communist agent? The Abbey line on this is that I was a tortured soul who was carried away by idealism: I have confessed to this repeatedly, but I regret to say that it is totally untrue. I came in contact with Communism soon after I first joined a trade-union – and the only reason why I joined a union was because I had exhausted all other means of drawing my parents’ attentions to me. I interested myself in Communism only when I noticed that the Communists in my union had advanced a shocking step further. To this day I am able to relive the thrill that went through me when first I sensed the
apartness
of these men – their feigned nonchalance, the friendly smile with which they embarrassed normal people, the impression they gave of being the only members of our happy family who knew what skeletons were in the cupboards. I had no sooner become aware of them than I was filled with the conviction that I, too, could look and walk like them – just as, later, when I stumbled on the saints I had no difficulty in adjusting my stride.

I would like to interject here a warning to parents. None of you, I am sure, wants to see your son become first a secret agent of Materialism and then a public-relations agent of the Incomprehensible. Well,
you can prevent this from happening if you will only hold your tongue and stop bragging about the little chap. Whenever I felt lazy or vapid and put on a moon-face, my father always bellowed at the top of his voice: ‘Just look at him! With the other children you always know where you are, but you never know what’s at the back of
his
mind!’ It had not occurred to me before that I
had
a back to my mind, but once this area had been brought to my attention as the place where admiration is found, I took a life-lease of the premises. When my parents said: ‘Well, boys, we have a surprise today: we are going to take you to the circus,’ I never turned a hair. While my brothers catcalled and hurrahed, I sat with a pudding-face, looking, if anything, more depressed than pleased. My father was enthralled. ‘Just look at the little b—!’ he would shriek, ‘not a squeak out of him! I wonder what’s going on
inside
–
at
the
back?
My mother would tousle my hair and murmur fondly: ‘A mother
always
knows. He’s more thrilled than all the rest of them put together –
that’s
why he’s so quiet.’ I would reward her with a coy, inscrutable smile, leave the table, and retire to a position in the garden which was just visible from the dining-room window. There I would stand staring at nothing, until I glimpsed the corner of my father’s nose against the edge of the pane and heard his muffled roar: ‘Damn my eyes, what’s the little devil up to now? If this goes on, there’s no saying what he’ll be when he’s older.’

Oh, my dear parents, I would have loved and honoured you more if you had not forced me to devote the bulk of my childhood to making an unknown quantity. It was you who taught me that mystery commands the greatest respect and that the highest identity is a secret nothing.